Possibilites With My Own Sand Boas

As I previously stated, i have four kenyan sand boas. With my current collection of Nuclear and Dodoma animals with snow recessive traits, there is great potential. Lets pair the Nuclear DH Snow to the normal. The nuclear is inherited the same way skin color would be, so all the babies would be "25% nuclear", because in order for him to be het snow, he would have to be paired with a non nuclear snow, which makes him 50%. Some would be brighter than others. The het to no het would make all of the babies 50% het albino, and 50% het anery. Many breeders would write this as 50% het snow, but thats really not the case. There would only really be a 25% chance that the baby would be het for both albino and anery, since you'd have to beat the 50% odds twice. So every baby would be a Nuclear Cross 25% het Snow. If i paired the snow dodoma cross, to the normal, every baby would be 12.5% Dodoma het Snow. This is because the male is the grandson of a pure dodoma or 100% dodoma, and his father was 50%. That makes him 25% dodoma, and his offspring 12.5. The babies would still look very nice, however, as his ancestors were paired with very nice animals. If the two Snow Dodoma Crosses were paired the babies would all be 25% Snow Dodoma crosses, just as their parents are. The most exciting pairing comes from the Nuclear DH Snow male to the Snow Dodoma Cross female. There are four possible phenotypes that could be produced by the litter, all including Nuclear and Dodoma. The combination is referred to as a Nuclear Meltdown, but because there isn't much Dodoma blood I would call it a Nuclear Meltdown Cross. So there would be NMD 100% het Snow, Anery NMD 100% het albino, Albino NMD 100% het anery (what I'm looking forward to the most), and finally Snow NMD. Definitely excited for the future!

Buy Smart

I own a very small collection of four kenyan sand boas, 2.2, or two males and two females. The males are a Nuclear DH Snow, and a Snow Dodoma Cross. The girls are one big normal girl, who happens to be my first snake ever, and another Snow Dodoma Cross. You can see I'm sticking to a sort of theme here, Snow with color and pattern enhancing blood. Its also nice to have my Nuclear as het for albino and anery, rather than visually express them. Reason being I'll get albinos, aneries and snows when i pair him to my snow girl. This brings me to my next point of buying smart. It would make absolutely no sense to go out and purchase and males right now. At this point, I only have one really nice girl, and two males, so i have to choose; so why would I go out and purchase a third male? Because I think its cute? Now if you keep sand boas strictly as pets and are 100% sure you'll never breed in the future, then by all means buy 20 males, but if there is even the slightest possibility you may want to in the future, invest in females early. They take over twice as long to mature so you'll have some time to think about it. If you have a ton of males and you decide you want to start breeding, unless you can find a nice adult female for sale (doubtful unless you want to spend half your lifes savings) you'll have to wait  two years for your babies to grow up. It also doesn't makes to have a solid program focusing on say, albinos, and go out and buy a paradox albino, because the two are not compatible. If you plan on starting a paradox program at some point in the future, however, then it may be a smart investment.

Possible Outcomes

A punnet square can be used to predict the outcomes of single gene pairings, but unless you want to get real elaborate with your squaring, a pencil and paper is the best way to discover the outcomes of more complex pairings. You can probably do simple recessive pairings in your head. If you pair a het anery to an albino het anery, you would get aneries 100% het albino, and normals het albino 66% het anery. The 66% ties back to a previous post about possible hets. Lets say you throw a stripe in there though, it gets a little saucier. Make the het anery a stripe het anery, which means, statistically, half your offspring would be stripes, and half would be tigers. Therefore you would have anery stripes 100% het albino, anery tigers 100% het albino, stripe het albinos 66% het anery, and tiger het albinos 66% anery. Heres one thats a little more difficult, lets say you pair a Paradox Snow, to an Albino Splash het anery. Think about that one in your head for a minute... It would be much easier to just write it out, and save you the chance of a mistake. Think about which genes make up each animal. Paradox Snow includes paradox albino and anery, two recessive genes. Albino splash het anery includes albino, splash and anery, even though it is not physically apparent. Which genes are compatible? Only ONE, anery. Paradox Albino and Albino are two completely different genes, and if you don't keep this in mind you could end up with a bunch of normal looking snakes. Since only one recessive trait is compatible, that means that its the only one that can be visually expressed. This leaves three other genes, that were originally visual, to be hets. The possible outcomes for this litter are, anery TH (triple het) albino, splash, albino paradox, and the other is a normal QH (quadruple het) albino, splash, paradox albino, anery. Even though you just paired two extremely high quality snakes, you ended up with a bunch of normals and aneries. This is why you have to be smart with your pairings, think of the outcomes before you throw your male in. You have to strategize and think of the future of your breeding program, or projects you want to work on; being careful can't hurt.

Numbers

Nobody wants to waste a few seconds of time writing out, " I have 3 male sand boas, 6 females, and 2 that im not sure of the sex." You could just write " I have 3.6.2 sand boas" These numbers are often used when describing collections, or a large group of snakes are being sold. For people who do not understand, this can be confusing. The first number represents the number of males, 1.0 would be one male. The second number represent females, 1.1 would be one male and one female. There does not have to be a third zero if there are no unsexed animals, but if there are, a third number must be added. So as an example, 2.6.1 would be two males, six females, and one unsexed. 2.6 would be 2 males and two females, but because there is no third number, there are no unsexed snakes.

The Glorious Punnet Square

If you find the whole genetics side of things daunting, a punnet square can be extremely beneficial. They are mainly used to help with predicting offspring and definetly simplifies all my ranting about recessive pairings. To create one for a single gene pairing, put four boxes together to create one big box. Represent the dominant genes with captital letters and recessive genes with lowercase letters. They must be in pairs of two, for example, an albino animal would be aa and a normal het albino would be Na. Do the same thing with the other animal on the left side, and then it becomes almost a sort of math problem. Think of it like a multiplication table at school. There should be one letter over each box, and one to the left of each box on the left. Put each letter in the boxes across of them on the left and below them from the top. The result is the babies that will be produced be the pairing, and the percent chance of them being produced. Each box is a 25% chance. This isnt very easy to explain, but the picture at the bottom should help. Let the capital A represent normal, and the lowercase a represent albino. The result is 25% normals, 50% normal het albinos, and 25% visual albinos, or NN, Na, Na, aa. 

Percentage Hets

These can often be confusing to people who've never bred animals or are new to the hobby. Percentage hets is basically the percent chance that an animal is heterozygous for a recessive gene. Holloway Herps has had 66% het Paints for sale for a few years, and recently the first paints that wernt produced by Jeff Holloway were born, a few of the litters were from those possible hets! Babies that are possible hets are produced from animals that are already het themselves. 66% hets are from het x het pairings, and 50% hets are from het x not hets. Het to het looks like this, we'll use albino as an example; Na x Na. You would get NN, Na, Na, aa. This means that 3/4 of the babies have normal phenotypes, but not all of them are heterozygous for albino. Two thirds, or 66% are, hence 66% het. Het x NotHet looks like NN x Na, meaning you would get NN and Na. All of the babies would have normal phenotypes, but only half would actually be het albino, hence 50% albino.

Rufescens

Rufescens pairings often confuse people. To me, they're very exciting, because the results are so variable. Statistically, if you breed a rufescens to a normal, half of the offspring will be stripes and half will be tigers. There are some in between that look like brown snakes with orange flecks and dashes, and theyre often called rufescens crosses. Stripes are pretty self explanatory, theyre brownish black with an orange stripe running from their head to their tail. Tigers, however, appear to be normal. A few features tigers may have would be darker spotting and horizaontalish barring, hence tiger. The only reason tigers really exist and stand apart from normals is the symbolize the presence of rufescens blood. Though stripes seem far closer in relation to pure rufescens animals, you could have a stripe that is 25% rufescens and a tiger that is 75%. This also connects back to trusting your breeder. You can have a stripe that looks very much like a pure ruf, with almost no orange at all and have it sold to you for twice its worth, only to end up with a litter of stripes and tigers when you pair it to a true ruf. To me, it makes far more sense to invest in male stripes as opposed to females. You can pair a male to multiple females and have multiple stripe litters where as a female's striped genes can only passed on once a year. Striped combos are destined for greatness, and Splash Stripes should be produced next year, if not within a few months. Im not sure how apparent a stripe would be when combined with the paint gene, as paints already have a very nice stripe of their own.